Rodney Brooks, Founder of iRobot and Heartland Robotics, To Retire From MIT

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Famed robotics expert Rodney Brooks, the former director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), is retiring from academic duties at MIT as of this week. The co-founder and former chief technical officer of Bedford, MA-based iRobot will be focusing full-time on his newest company, Heartland Robotics, based in Cambridge, MA. Brooks’s new role as professor emeritus at MIT will be effective this Thursday, July 1. He is 55.

There is some question as to whether Brooks will be the youngest professor emeritus in the history of his department (electrical engineering and computer science). Reached by e-mail, Brooks confirms he is the youngest of the current crop of MIT professors who are retiring this year—at least those on a list announced at a faculty meeting last month. And current regulations at MIT say a professor must be at least 55 to achieve emeritus status, so he is probably among the youngest, at least in recent history. “It may be that come this Thursday I will be the current youngest emeritus professor at MIT, but I can’t say that for sure,” Brooks says.

Brooks is widely known for his scientific contributions to computer vision, mobile robots, humanoid robots, artificial intelligence, and artificial life. He did postdoctoral research at Carnegie Mellon University and MIT before becoming a professor at Stanford University (where he had done his PhD in computer science) and then MIT in 1984, where he has stayed as a full-time faculty member until now. Brooks was director of the MIT AI Lab before it merged with the Laboratory for Computer Science to form CSAIL in 2003. He stepped down as director of CSAIL in June 2007 to dive deeper into science and, as it turns out, to try to create a new industry.

“I spent my career at MIT developing new ideas for how to make robots intelligent. Through iRobot I have been very successful at getting robots out in the world based on those ideas. In terms of raw numbers the majority of robots that are sold today are behavior-based, and follow the ideas I worked on in the eighties,” Brooks says. “Now I am trying to develop a new class of robots for deployment in the real world that are based on the work that my students and I did during the nineties and later.”

2 responses to “Rodney Brooks, Founder of iRobot and Heartland Robotics, To Retire From MIT”

I spent a year hanging out in Hans Moravec’s and Red Whittaker’s robot labs at CMU around 1985, and then spent a year managing the Princeton Robotics lab. I’ve been thinking about the socio-economic implications of advancing automation on-and-off for a long time. Here is my current thinking on how these robots like Rodney Brooks is making can be a boon to humanity instead of a bane: “Beyond a Jobless Recovery: A heterodox perspective on 21st century economics”http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery

Essentially, the way forward includes a mix of a basic income (Social Security for all), a gift economy (like Debian GNU/Linux), democratic resource-based planning (with taxes, subsidies, and public works programs), and/or stronger local communities with greater self-sufficiency (like with RepRap and organic gardening robots). We have aspects of all those now, but we need to do better.

Otherwise, our current economic system, based on a scarcity paradigm, will ironically use the tools of abundance in harmful ways — to fight over perceived scarcity rather than produce abundance directly with them. For example, right now military robots are ironically being built to enforce a social order based around making people work like robots, rather than just building robots to do the work instead. For a similar long-standing irony, we have built nuclear missiles to fight over oil lands, rather than just using the same technology to build clean energy systems (renewable and/or nuclear) for endless power and self-replicating space habitats for endless land.

So, while I applaud what Rodeny Brooks is doing, I believe we need broader socio-economic changes to get the most out of what he and many other technologists are doing and otherwise avoid economic disaster. For example the US GDP grew 40% in the past decade with no net increase in jobs, and that’s before Heartland Robotics is selling products intended to replace people or, at least, allow fewer people to produce a lot more, which is what “productivity increases” means.

Advanced robotics exposes at least three flawed assumptions in mainstream macroeconomics: * that demand for stuff and services is effectively unlimited; * that wealth from efficiency improvements will be evenly distributed; and * that most human labor will always have value. Without these assumptions, mainstream macroeconomic equations blow up with divide-by-zero errors. Robotics deployed within a low-tax capitalist framework invalidates all three of these assumptions in various ways. The result would be widespread suffering by most people in that society (see Marshall Brain’s novel Manna for an example of that) — unless we accept these implications and rethink several fundamental assumptions (including schooling and paid jobs) related to how our society would work if it is based around an abundance paradigm instead of the current scarcity paradigm.